If you hate your job you might like Assistance'

By DANTE J.J. BEVILACQUA, For the Journal Register News Service

Friday, January 18, 2013

If you’re one of the 45 percent of Americans who’s unhappy in their current job, you’ll feel recognized, if not rewarded, after seeing the haggard, broken-down, beaten-up drones in Leslye Headland’s dark comedy “Assistance” at the Wilma Theatre.

In this case, the monster-boss is one Daniel Weisinger, a modern-day movie mogul who is not seen or even heard during the course of Headland’s 90-minute play.

Headland says her play about long-suffering executive assistants is not a tell-all, but the notoriously irascible personality of her former boss, Harvey Weinstein, is stamped all over it.

It is never clear what the Weisinger Company does, but it is instantly obvious that the people who work there are all miserable, noisy, desperate and jockeying for position in jobs that are going nowhere.

Back at Daniel’s New York office, a small army of young people endure endless threats and humiliation from on high as they desperately try to keep Daniel plugged in, patching in phone calls from all over, FedExing contracts, keeping his credit cards up to date, and sending his meds to his apartment, or to the airport minutes before his plane lands there.

Their boss corrects their grammar, calls them stupid and tells them to learn how to read. Nora quickly learns that despite her college education and eagerness to move ahead, she will forever be ordering flowers, walking dogs, scanning pages and maxing out her own credit cards to work as an assistant.

They’re chasing an endlessly moving target, one mistake away from disaster and a tongue-lashing, a certain controlled hysteria prevails.

By convincing themselves that they’re doing Very Important Work for a Very Important Person, the drones employed by this mysterious firm continually rationalize their own self-importance.

In lieu of an actual plot, Headland’s edgy comedy lays out a trajectory for the smart, hyperactive junior execs who come and go and crash and burn at Daniel’s whim.

Despite the authenticity of its workplace milieu, “Assistance” is more a situation than a fully realized play, stringing together office-life episodes to depict a pathology of the contemporary professional world.

The deeply flawed characters are so abrasive in their career clamoring that it’s difficult to accept them as people. Under the direction of David Kennedy, the morphing and gyrating on stage depicts cartoon characters more than fleshed out people as they continually react to their boss on the other end of a phone line.

It’s been done before with more edge and wit, in movies like Horrible Bosses and TV shows like The Office. The 90 minutes drags with only occasional interludes of joy to pick up the pace. Mostly the assistants just bicker, dance, drink, smoke and occasionally kiss.

To put names to these pawns: Vince (Jake Blouch) is followed by Nick (Kevin Meehan) who is followed by Nora (Kate Czajkowski) who is followed by Heather (Kayun Kim) who is followed by Jenny (Emily Althaus). The shelf life of an assistant is around 17 months, time enough for the transformation from eager intern to strung-out drudge to candidate for institutionalization.

“Assistance” ultimately is about ambition. As the workers appropriate the behavior of the boss, the characters swap dignity, self-worth and even sanity for proximity to entrepreneurial brilliance. Headland is an alchemist, a specialist in distilling laughter out of pure misery.

In an awkward postscript, unrelated to anything else, one of the assistants breaks into a wild tap dance number while the whole set collapses onto the stage before the audience’s eyes. The play surrounding it has collapsed much earlier.